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Not only is Danai Gurira a star on one of TV’s most popular shows, AMC’s The Walking Dead, but she’s also been busy portraying fearsome general Okoye in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther and the spring blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War. As if that weren’t enough, she’s the cofounder of a nonprofit, Almasi Arts, which supports and facilitates the dramatic arts in Zimbabwe, and she’s knee-deep in her next project, adapting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s award-winning novel Americanah into a TV miniseries.

For such a busy woman, Danai is remarkably down to earth, and she knows that the only way she can tackle her overflowing to-do list is by staying mentally and physically fit. In person, the results of her effort are clear. The 40-year-old has a powerful—almost regal—presence and moves her body with the gracefulness of a dancer: head high, shoulders back. Her secret? A mix of eating well (tonight it’s salmon, brussels sprouts, and spinach), spiritual practice, listening to her body, and, of course, exercise.

Even though her workouts are meticulously planned and quite challenging, Danai loves simply being active. She grew up participating in sports and still hits the water whenever she can. “I don’t remember ever not being able to swim,” says Danai, who was motivated to start when she saw her older sister taking lessons. “I jumped in the water and was insistent on learning to swim with her.”

Danai’s workouts prepare her for her rigorous on-camera roles, yes, but there’s a real-life empowerment element to them too. “As women, we’re not always encouraged to find the fullest extent of our physical power,” she says. “There’s something so exciting about tapping into that part of ourselves.”

Danai, who has won numerous awards as a playwright and was nominated for a Tony Award in 2016, firmly believes in the power of storytelling—especially narratives that highlight the experiences of African women. The fact that she didn’t hear or see those stories while she was growing up is what inspired her to start writing. The global success of Black Panther has fulfilled her in many ways. “It kind of affirms that little African girl’s instinct that these stories would resonate if they were told with passion, integrity, and excellence.”

Though she’s accomplished so much, there’s still work to be done. And Danai has no plans to rest. As she tells young people she meets along the way, “There’s no app for skipping hard work; you have to seek your purpose and pursue it.” What keeps her fueled is “remembering the goals,” and making sure that when she’s finished living in this world, she’ll have given it her all.

Justin Theroux seems to have figured out how to engineer his life so that he enjoys it more often than he doesn’t. So work is rewarding more than it is soul-crushing. Remember, the guy’s 46—he’s been around a few blocks.

Let’s start with range. It’s his professional hallmark. Actor, writer, producer. He played a douchey director for David Lynch in Mulholland Drive, a psycho with a six-pack in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and Evil DJ in the Zoolander films. (He wrote the second one.) He also joined the screenwriter ranks with Tropic Thunder, Iron Man 2, and Rock of Ages. The “full retard” speech in Tropic is all his. More recently, he’s gone heavy, headlining HBO’s The Leftovers for three seasons and taking parts in The Girl on the Train and the underrated Netflix flick Mute. (The sick-o-meter goes to 11 in the latter role.)

In the early ’90s, after graduating from Bennington College with a drama and visual-arts degree, he became that stereotypical young N.Y.C. artist bouncing between acting jobs and painting murals in nightclubs, then expanding into bitsy film roles and, eventually, bigger gigs.

In those younger days, though, he felt the pain of things not going the way or at the pace he wanted. “When I was in my early 20s, I was impatient,” he says. “Always wanting things to happen the way I wanted them to happen. And that has gone away. Not completely—because there are definitely things I want to happen in the time I want them to happen. But I don’t lose sleep over things anymore the same way I used to.”

Aside from work, Theroux fills out his life with some genuine loves: motorcycles and dogs. If you ask him about his favorite bike, he rattles off a complete paragraph in one breath. He’s also partial to pit bulls—he is taking custody of a new rescue later in the week. “Dogs do drive you crazy,” he says. “It’s like having a toddler that’ll never speak, and toward the end of their life they get very sweet and tender and break your heart.”

In the meantime, may we all push ourselves to a point where we can say something like this: “There’s nothing I’m dying to do. Nothing gnawing at me.” Then Theroux laughs. “There are things I know I will do. I just don’t know what they are yet.”

The Insecure star shines in the summer’s best beauty and talks finding your inner confidence.

Her show may be called Insecure, but writer, actress and all-around badass Issa Rae is anything but. And these bold summer beauty looks? Equally boss. Here’s Issa on everything from blocking out the haters to what it was like becoming the face of CoverGirl.

Why confidence is a continuum:

“Confidence comes from knowing your shit is good. I’m for sure confident when it comes to work and trying to fulfill my dreams. Socially, the confidence has teetered, but that’s growing as I’m coming into who I am.”

How she doesn’t hear the haters:

“There comes a point when you have to block it out but remain humble—that’s the balance I’m trying to navigate.”

Why appearances are personal:

“I’m going to look how I want to look—it’s going to be on my own terms. If people criticize my look, it really does not matter to me. It’s about how I feel.”

On that season two glow-up:

“I thrive off fresh starts. I will do a cleanse or diet—I need a reset button. So seeing myself on TV for a season was an excuse to be like ‘I want to lose a couple of pounds.’ I want to look my best, be my best, and feel my best.”

Becoming the face of CoverGirl was…

“Kind of surreal. Like, ‘Wow, y’all are choosing me?’ It was for the little girl in me who never thought that this would be possible. There’s power in representation. There’s affirmation in representation.”

How she wants women of color to be seen onscreen:

“I prioritize making darkskinned women desirable. You don’t see a lot of dark-skin representation. That’s been overlooked. Also, seeing them as beautiful, in addition to desirable, which are two very different things.”

Mandy Moore’s house is a testament to the actress/singer’s confidence, warmth, and passion for design. Even in a town as youth-obsessed as Hollywood, a little maturity has its own compensations. Just ask Mandy Moore. The star of the NBC family drama This Is Us rose to fame as a singer in 1999, at the tender age of 15, with her debut single, “Candy.” She played her first starring role on the big screen in A Walk to Remember in 2002. That same year Moore bought a “starter” home, a five-bedroom Mediterranean-style spread in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz. “I lived there for 15 years, and even though the house went through several iterations, it never felt wholly mine,” she says. “I bought it when I was 18. I really didn’t know myself, and I never felt secure enough to bring a lot of people there.”

Today Moore is singing an entirely different song. She recently wrapped shooting on the third season of her smash television show. She’s engaged to Taylor Goldsmith of the indie rock band Dawes. And the dazzling home she created for herself, her future husband, and their dogs, Joni (as in Mitchell) and Jackson, is nothing short of a declaration of independence. “This house signifies the next chapter of my life—as an adult, a woman, and a performer. I was able to pour all of who I am into making this place,” she says proudly.

After searching for nearly a year, Moore and Goldsmith found the perfect spot to begin their life together, high atop a Pasadena hill, in a classic 1950s home with sweeping vistas of the San Gabriel mountains and valley. The house was designed by Harold B. Zook, a notable but lesser-known architect who worked with modernist maestro Albert Frey in Palm Springs before hanging his shingle in Pasadena.

Surveying her domain, Moore confesses to having become slightly addicted to the design process. “It still amazes me. We saw the potential of this house and brought it back to life. It’s hard to convey the excitement of working out every detail, from picking slabs at the stone yard to figuring out how many burners we wanted for the stove,” she explains. “Once you realize that you can actually build your true dream house, it’s hard to go back to anything else.”

Killer, drug kingpin, husband with a girlfriend on the side, and built like Black Superman—now that’s a man without a confidence problem. But that’s James “Ghost” St. Patrick, the alter ego-packed protagonist Omari Hardwick portrays on the Starz crime drama Power.

Hardwick’s real-life story is very different. He discussed his own dance with power recently between bites of his pasta, chicken and string beans lunch following his EBONY cover photo shoot in Brooklyn, New York. As a kid, Hardwick, 44, dreamed of a professional sports career after receiving a football scholarship from the University of Georgia. “I had moxie and confidence as an athlete, but I was masked with 60 other athletes on the football team,” Hardwick says. When not playing a leading role, “I was masked by 50 other people on the set.”

After a professional football career didn’t happen, Hardwick went hard into acting—paying for acting classes by working many jobs at once. He was a substitute teacher and coach at Campbell Hall, an Episcopal day school in the Studio City area of Los Angeles. He sold women’s shoes at Nordstrom, worked catering halls and did security gigs “when I still had 200 pounds of football weight on me.”

On Power, Hardwick plays a man attempting to cut ties with the drug world, where he is known as Ghost, and become legitimate businessman James St. Patrick, while trying to rekindle his relationship with his high school sweetheart (who calls him “Jamie”). Hardwick says, “The show has been good for me.”

Still, Hardwick says he’s doing what he can to make some things better. “I was always involved in giving back to the community, and I always felt I could give back in time, not necessarily money,” he explains, emphasizing that time spent with his children and with other young people is more valuable to them.

The Omari Hardwick bluapple Poetry Network is an after-school spoken-word poetry program free to students in Florida attending Broward, Dade and Palm Beach County schools. Through the Real to Reel film competition, Hardwick helps celebrate aspiring Black filmmakers who are at least 21 years old. The winner receives a private screening of their work and $10,000.

Narcos alum Pedro Pascal is featured in the July 2018 issue of GQ Magazine.

From the digital issue:

“I’ve been to such extreme locations,” Narcos star Pedro Pascal says from Oahu where he’s filming a scene that he describes as “survivalist.” Hawaii is good to him, though. “At the end of the day, it’s a caress being here. There aren’t any snakes, no deadly spiders. It rains a lot but it’s never cold. The locals are just too cool.”

Still, he feels he’s been away from his spiritual home (New York City) for far too long. He’ll be leaving Oahu soon for London and a Wonder Woman sequel. He misses being onstage in New York, where he hustled in theater and on cop shows for more than a decade.